A Journey Toward Faith-Based Advising

Transcript

Harry Pearson: And that single moment changed me personally, my family personally, it changed the direction of our business, how we serve families. And I had no idea what was going to take place from that moment.

Tim Weinhold: How’d you start down this road? What prompted you to say, oh, what I want to do with my life is be a Christian financial advisor?

Harry Pearson: Well, that’s a great question. No one had ever taught me, even though I was a believer, no one had ever taught me how to integrate faith into a conversation. I tried to do that through just relationally doing it, but I never had somebody teach me a framework or give me the tools to actually apply into a financial context. And so I wasn’t sure how to do that. But the whole time I knew that I loved it because I was in the lives of people. And they were sitting across the table from me and they were sharing with me their deepest goals, and they were sharing their pain. And that was really my career for the first, I’d say 12 years of my career. Going and getting another client, serving what I had and building a business.

Hearing the words biblically responsible in the same sentence, in the same phrase, made all my defensive mechanisms pop up. And I felt like, hold on a second, who are the dudes in the black robes in the back room choosing what’s biblically responsible and what’s not biblically responsible. It feels a little bit like a marketing gimmick to me, are we putting a verse on a peppermint, calling it a holy mint? What are we doing here? Right. And I just didn’t like the context.

I remember that moment. The Lord gently popped me in the mouth and got my attention. And for the first time I became clear that this was not a question of biblically responsible investing. This became a question of who is the owner. And if we believe that God is the owner of all things, then that makes us the steward of His things. And if we’re the steward of His things, shouldn’t we consider aligning His assets with His principles and with companies that bless mankind instead of cause harm.